Classical mosaic art is a great source of visual splendor dating back to ancient Greece and Rome. The impact of this art form remains enduring as mosaics continue to adorn large public spaces and add beautiful accents to private homes. Today, this ancient art remains a heavily labor-intensive exercise in both design and construction. It has stubbornly resisted automation, adding considerable cost to any project limiting its usage. Conditions are now suitable for introducing robotics and software tools to design, render, and manufacture mosaic artwork. In the tile mosaic industry, there are two styles of mosaic fabrication: “free-form” and “grid”. A mosaic fabricated in the grid style typically has square tiles laid out in a rectilinear pattern as shown in FIG. 1B. As can be seen in FIG. 1A, it is very difficult to accurately render an image, such as the image in FIG. 1A, in this mosaic style. On the other hand, free form style mosaics can be fabricated with irregularly shaped tiles, and as shown in FIG. 1C, this style of mosaic can more accurately render the image in FIG. 1A. While free-form is considered to be the ultimate artisanal type, manually cutting each tile to a specific shape is rather tedious and difficult to automate making free-form mosaics very costly due to increased production costs.
Typically, a mosaic design is based upon a pre-existing image, or an image that is created by an artist specifically for the mosaic design. Regardless, mosaic design applications are available that automate portions or substantially all of the mosaic design creation process, particularly for the simpler case of “grid” mosaic. A mosaic designer can use the mosaic design application to assist with laying out individual mosaic tiles in a grid or free-form style that is a reasonable facsimile of the original image. The design tool can automate certain steps of the mosaic creation process and can support manual intervention by the designer in the mosaic creation process. One such design tool is available from Artaic, LLC under the trade name TerreraPro.
A mosaic design application can be used to assist with the process of placing individual tiles in a mosaic design, and the tool can operate to generate a mosaic worksheet file. The mosaic design application can be a computer application running on a computer workstation or other suitable computational device, and the worksheet file can have, among other things, information relating to the size of a mosaic image, grout line width, and the position, the color, and the size and shape of each tile in a mosaic image. The mosaic design application can compile the information comprising the worksheet file into machine instructions which can be stored in association with a network server. Some portion of the tiles that are included in the mosaic design rendered by the mosaic design application can be a standard size and shape, and some portion of the tiles included in the mosaic image can be a non-standard size and shape. In this regard, using a mosaic design application to lay out tiles in a free-form style very typically can result in some number of the total tiles in the mosaic having a variety of non-standard or irregular shapes. Irregular in this context means that the tile is other than a standard tile shape. For example, if a standard shape is considered to be square, than a non-standard shape can be a polygon other than a square. So after an irregularly shaped tile is cut, it can take on a polygonal shape that may or may not be a square shape, such as a triangle, pentagon, etc.